‘Glee’: Unreleased Cory Monteith version of ‘Seasons of Love’ leaks

Around the six-month anniversary of Cory Monteith’s shocking and tragic death in Vancouver, a “Glee” track featuring him from way back in season 3 has hit the internet. Of course, we’ll warn you beforehand that if you were a big fan of Cory, then odds are that listening to this is going to tear you up completely.

This song is “Seasons of Love,” the “Rent” classic that was re-recorded for the Cory tribute episode of “The Quarterback” earlier this year. This older version featured the entire original New Directions, and was done back during the season 3 finale themed around graduation. It was never used in the show proper, and was also not a part of the soundtrack that was released for it.

It is curious that the show decided to record the song and then never use it, and it was clearly for different reasons other than they wanted to keep it in their back pocket for something terrible down the road. They may have just had too many other songs that made more sense for the show, and they wanted to put the focus on these a little bit more than this one. We know that there is also going to be a sad fascination with the line of the song (listen below) that Cory sings, with some thinking that it was in some way prophetic. We don’t really think that way, since this is the sort of stuff that people scour the internet for any time after there is a tragedy, just as a way to understandably try to make sense out of the terrible thing that happened.

The important thing after listening to this is mostly to continue to remember the actor for the happy times, and to take everything that his co-stars said about him to heart when it comes to how to be a good friend and colleague. He may have had troubles, but he also had an enormously big heart.